


It Always Ends In the Gavotte

by themousewitch



Series: accidental blessings [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Adam is there but not a lot, Aziraphale is done giving a fuck, Aziraphale loves sushi, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley hates the philosophers, Crowley yells at God it is canon, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), It takes divine intervention for Newt to use a computer, M/M, Newt/Anathema is background, You know Aziraphale was unbearable, and hates selling things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 05:32:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19457392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themousewitch/pseuds/themousewitch
Summary: “It’s a bookshop,” Aziraphale said. “I like bookshops, remember? Always full of books, and I like books. Repositories of knowledge and such, books.”“Repositories of something,” Crowley muttered.Aziraphale frowned thoughtfully. “Adam did it,” he said a moment later.Crowley made a noise so undignified that he immediately expunged it from memory. “What, so the Antichrist bought you a bookshop? And that’s just … You’re just going to. You’re going to. You’re going to keep it, aren’t you?”“What else am I going to do with it?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley couldn’t answer, and that was that.--Aziraphale has a small crisis of faith and takes an invitation, Crowley is deeply unnerved and suspicious.He really hates the philosophers.





	It Always Ends In the Gavotte

On the second Monday after the end of the world, Aziraphale opened a small bookshop in Tadfield, because what else would he do after finding the deed, keys, and paperwork for said bookshop in a side drawer of his writing desk? For all he knew, there were employees to think about. Newt and Anathema seemed keen on staying, and there was Adam to be keeping an eye on, after all, and … well. Aziraphale found that after 11 years of near-constant contact with Crowley, he’d rather gotten used to having company.

The paperwork Aziraphale found strongly suggested his new acquisition was a comic book shop. Aziraphale frowned and strongly suggested to the paperwork that it was, in fact, a proper book shop with, oh all right, a comics section. Aziraphale didn’t have to like it, but he supposed Adam did deserve a proper thank you after having been grounded quite loudly by his father only moments after averting Armageddon and banishing Satan himself. For Adam, Aziraphale supposed he could sell a few comics. It might even keep him from having to actually sell any books, he thought and brightened significantly.

There was a sign already waiting behind the umbrella stand advertising Aziraphale’s even more convoluted hours in the London bookshop. Aziraphale expected he’d find its twin in Tadfield.

\--

On the first Thursday following the end of the world Crowley arrived, unannounced, in Aziraphale’s London shop.

“This place is in perfect condition,” Crowley said. He picked up a priceless first edition, thumbed lazily through it, and plonked it right back down. “I can’t believe you haven’t opened yet. They’re going to start asking questions about how you’re going to make the rent soon.”

Aziraphale blinked up from his seat on the sofa. There was a dwindling pile of books on the one side of him, and a haphazard pile on the other. “It’s been paid, Crowley. They won’t come by asking questions. They never do.” He took a sip of tea without looking up and then frowned at the cup until the tea was hot again.

Crowley sat on the other end of the couch. He snagged a book from what he assumed was the pile Aziraphale had finished with. “Don’t tell me you’re back on the philosophers, angel. You were unbearable when they were published, and that’s not going to change now.”

Aziraphale scowled, then scowled again as he realized he’d proved Crowley’s point. “Oh, what do you want, anyway?”

Crowley put a hand to his chest in mock pain. “You wound me. I can’t check in on a friend? Oh bugger, you _are_ on the philosophers again, aren’t you? Why would you do that to yourself?”

This was an old dance of theirs, one where the words changed but the steps didn’t and both parties knew it by heart. The snide comments and backhanded antagonism and the very careful pretense that they didn’t know each other like an old, familiar book by now.

This was Aziraphale’s cue to glance heavenward as if for help and pronounce some idiotic bit of wisdom from Above and then pretend not to be very self-satisfied at Crowley’s annoyed response. Crowley waited.

Aziraphale sighed wearily and set the book aside, raising his palms briefly as if in surrender. “It seemed like the thing to do?” he offered.

Crowley frowned. “Is something actually wrong?” he very nearly asked.

But Aziraphale was already re-shelving books and tidying the teacups with his usual chatter, and Crowley shook his head to clear it and found that an entire tea service had appeared and oh, Crowley remembered those biscuits. They were delicious. There was nothing wrong with Aziraphale. There hadn’t been anything wrong with Aziraphale in six thousand years, not really. Why would he start now?

“I have,” Aziraphale announced unsteadily a few hours and a few bottles later. “I have a second bookshop.”

“But you’ve got enough trouble keeping people out of this one,” Crowley said, confused. “First the philosophy, but this. This is.”

“It’s a bookshop,” Aziraphale said. “I like bookshops, remember? Always full of books, and I like books. Repositories of knowledge and such, books.”

“Repositories of something,” Crowley muttered.

Aziraphale frowned thoughtfully. “Adam did it,” he said a moment later.

Crowley made a noise so undignified that he immediately expunged it from memory. “What, so the Antichrist bought you a bookshop? And that’s just … You’re just going to. You’re going to. You’re going to _keep_ it, aren’t you?”

“What else am I going to do with it?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley couldn’t answer, and that was that.

\--

On the first Saturday after the end of the world, Aziraphale tossed bread to the ducks in St. James Park and watched intently as two agents from rival nations brokered a backdoor deal for peace.

“Really, angel? I am right here,” Crowley said.

“My dear, we both know you aren’t actually interested in killing people,” Aziraphale said.

“Angel,” Crowley said, irritated. He _wasn’t_ actually terribly interested in killing people, of course, but it was rude to point it out like that.

“Am I, do you think?” Aziraphale asked suddenly, sharply, and Crowley recoiled, all the lazy good humor vanishing. “Am I an angel still? They tried to burn me! Well you, pretending to be me.”

Aziraphale sat up straighter, gathering steam, pulled along by the momentum of six thousand years of blind obedience, of rage and horror carefully tucked away and compartmentalized in the name of the Greater Good. They had killed _children_ , they had laid waste to entire city-states and countries, they had been prepared to destroy 7 billion people and they had never stopped to question it, not once, and it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t.

“I don’t work for them anymore. I won’t,” Aziraphale said, but that wasn’t right, either. He had told them he wouldn’t fight their war, that he wouldn’t be killing anybody. “I think I, er, quit.”

“You can’t just quit,” Crowley said, annoyed. “You Fall. Don’t make that face, you’d know. Trust me, it’s not the kind of thing you can forget.”

“Crowley, I’m-”

“At any rate,” Crowley said loudly until Aziraphale got the hint and stopped apologizing. “I doubt either one of us technically works for our respective head offices anymore. I haven’t gotten any orders.”

“Not a single memo,” Aziraphale murmured. He didn’t exactly regret not having to deal with the likes of Gabriel any longer.

“It’s probably wise to keep tabs on the Antichrist,” Crowley offered.

“His name is Adam.”

“Adam, then. I’m just saying. We helped him. He helped us. Maybe it’s a good idea to stick close for a while.”

“You can just say that you’re lonely,” Aziraphale said, and felt warmth curl in his belly at Crowley’s indignant response. He watched the ducks on the water and let the words wash over him and for the first time since the end of the world, he felt something like hope in his chest.

Aziraphale had spent his entire existence doing his best not to question ineffability, not to wonder why humanity had to be tested and punished and tested again. He’d done his job, not asking, not looking, not _feeling_ , and then he’d run headlong into the new and terrible certainty that Heaven was in fact just as bloody as Hell, only much less honest about it. That they would obliterate him the moment they believed they could.

He had run headlong into this certainty several times over the past week, and at least once last night. The effect was rather like running headlong into an avalanche, then careening off of a very tall cliff into freezing water and being carried off into several miles of rapids filled with very large rocks instead of simply drowning.

Aziraphale was very angry, very tired, and covered in philosophical bruises.

“You were right, you know,” Aziraphale said, and that stopped Crowley talking. It always did.

“About what?” Crowley asked suspiciously.

“This. Sides. You were right. We’re on our side.”

“Course I am,” Crowley said, with deep satisfaction. “I mean we are.”

“I should have trusted you sooner,” Aziraphale said, and it should have felt wrong to say such a thing to a demon. It should have been distressing, but that moment of hope had been like a spark to kindling.

There had been a number of metaphorical rocks against which Aziraphale’s faith had been dashed recently. Gabriel, for starters. Michael. Uriel. Aziraphale’s own sword, used against humanity for millennia.

And until this moment, God—or more accurately, Her absence—had been one of the most painful boulders. Just now, Aziraphale is looking at the world and wondering if perhaps She had intervened. Perhaps that bit about the ineffability wasn’t as unbelievable as it had felt.

Next to him, Crowley is wondering the same thing. For him, of course, the idea is a little less comforting.

\--

And so, on the second Monday after Armageddon, Aziraphale opened a bookshop that just happened to carry a small collection of comics in Tadfield.

Crowley brought chocolates, because it seemed like the normal thing to do and he was damn well going to do the normal thing, especially now that Aziraphale seemed to have abandoned the concept entirely. Bloody philosophers. They thought altogether too much and one could argue that Crowley himself was the nothing good that came of asking too many questions.

“Are those comics, angel?” Crowley demanded. “What is going on here?”

“You tell me. I don’t read them,” Aziraphale said. He was sitting at the front counter and he hadn’t looked up from where Newt cradled a slick silver tablet computer as if it might actually be an infant or perhaps a live grenade. “This is Newt-”

“Yes, I remember. It was a memorable day, angel.” Crowley ground out.

“Ah, yes. Well, Newt is explaining this very thin computer. Isn’t that nice?”

Crowley dropped the box on the table next to Aziraphale and snatched the tablet out of Newt’s hands.

“I was just telling him I didn’t think they had released this model yet …” Newt trailed off. His eyes tracked the tablet as Crowley examined it. He would probably have been very embarrassed to discover that Adam would immediately have recognized the expression as very similar to Dog’s, when Adam was holding a particularly delicious-smelling piece of food. Luckily for Newt, Adam was at home, enjoying a late breakfast and sneaking Dog bits of bacon underneath the table.

“They haven’t released it,” Crowley said, poking at it with all of his senses. “And the first release is due to have some very costly glitches, so it can’t be the real one. How long has it been on?” He held it at eye level and squinted.

“Nearly an hour,” Newt answered.

It had been the longest Newt had ever been able to use a computer, and as far as Newt was concerned it was very nearly heaven.

“And it works?”

“Perfectly.”

“Well, that can’t be right,” Crowley said. This release was supposed to end in a very expensive and embarrassing recall. He’d had assurances.

Crowley looked suspiciously at Aziraphale, who sighed heavily and looked away just as the tablet in Crowley’s hands shivered, sparked, and died.

Newt made the strangled sound of a man who’d watched his dreams die along with an overpriced tablet computer, largely because he had witnessed just that.

“Ha! That’s more like it,” Crowley said. He threw it in the bin. More accurately, he threw it in the general direction of the bin, and the bin arranged itself to catch it.

Newt scrambled over what he had expected to be the ruins of a very expensive technological marvel and was baffled to instead find an antique register and paper receipt book in the bin where the tablet had landed. “Wha?” Newt began, and Aziraphale appeared at his side with a mug of cocoa and shook his head gently.

“Best not, when he’s like this,” Aziraphale murmured. “Oh look, that’ll fit beautifully right over there, don’t you think?”

The shop was smaller than Aziraphale’s London one. It had _comic books_ and _computers_ and not one piece of the furniture was tartan, and Crowley didn’t like it one bit.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to hire him,” Crowley said, outraged. Newt froze, caught in the act of lifting the register from the bin.

“That’s brilliant!” Aziraphale beamed at Crowley, as if everything was perfectly fine and Aziraphale hadn’t just opened a second bloody bookshop halfway plastered with comic books and _adventure_ _novels_ , miles away from any respectable sushi restaurant. Aziraphale loved sushi and hated selling things.

No. Crowley did not like this at all.

Aziraphale turned, “You’re still a Witchfinder through the end of the month, aren’t you?”

“You’re _fired_ ,” Crowley spat viciously.

“You can’t fire him,” Aziraphale said, almost at the same time. “He works for me!”

Newt looked frantically between Aziraphale and Crowley, clearly trying to decide which of them he wanted to displease least. “I, uh, well. Technically, I am a Witchfinder but um, having found one … I wasn’t planning on … you know. That is, I was looking for a new position. I’m, uh, very sorry?” Newt pushed his glasses up nervously and dropped the register he had, in his panic, forgotten he was holding.

Aziraphale beamed and the register dropped itself onto the counter with a thump. Newt blinked at it, and visibly decided it had not been the strangest thing he’d experienced in the last several weeks.

“You’re hired,” Aziraphale said with a warmth that was positively _angelic_. Newt relaxed and Crowley gritted his teeth because he’d lost this one and he knew it. Aziraphale was dead set on … whatever this was and it was better to give in than to escalate matters. It was easier, that was all. 

“Fine,” said Crowley, several moments later. “He can stay.”

“You have no say in the matter,” Aziraphale reminded him gently.

“I could fire him.”

“You’ve already fired him. You can’t fire him again.”

“Watch me,” Crowley muttered peevishly, and Aziraphale laughed and shook his head and smiled sideways at him in a way that thrilled up Crowley’s spine.

Crowley considered storming out but lounged maliciously on the armchair instead. He did not think about the roar and crackle of thousands of books that, according to this new reality, had never burned.

\--

Newt had taken one look at the salary on the hiring paperwork and quickly decided that the four most relevant facts to the situation were, in no particular order:

  1. He was about to be sinfully overpaid to work as a cashier in a bookstore with questionable working hours.
  2. He wouldn’t have to touch a single computer in the course of his employment.
  3. He vaguely recalled his new employer as having been instrumental to saving the world, even if he could not remember how.
  4. The mafia almost certainly did not commit to filling out proper wages paperwork.



“I’ve sort of stumbled into a job down at the bookshop,” he told Anathema. He was on the landline in the back room—which held, he was thrilled to discover, exclusively paper records of all the shop’s inventory and such.

Anathema frowned on the other end of the line; Newt wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he was positive. Realization struck him in the same way most boxing gloves strike certain skulls.

“Oh God, I should have told you before, right? Is this the kind of thing couples are supposed to talk about?”

“No. No,” Anathema answered quickly. “I mean, yes. People normally do talk about these things first, but you don’t need my permission to get a job—what do you mean, the bookshop? There isn’t a bookshop in Tadfield.”

Newt looked around and opened a few file cabinets. “It is definitely a bookshop,” he said.

“Where are you?” Anathema asked, and repeated the address he’d given her incredulously. “I’ll be right there,” she said, and hung up.

Newt hung up and regarded the back room of the maybe-almost-definitely-a-bookshop nervously.

He came back out to the front, where his employer (Shadwell had exclusively referred to him as “that southern pansy” and Newt was absolutely not going to do the same) grumbled over papers at the front.

“Erm. Mister … I don’t exactly know what to call you.” There were an awful lot of questions Newt probably should have asked before he had taken the job, he realized.

“Mr. Fell will do fine,” the blonde man said, at the same time as the other one said, “An idiot.”

“Mr. Fell,” Newt repeated.

“We did save the world together. I suppose you could call me by my given name,” Mr. Fell said, and then he said a word that seared itself into Newt’s brain and promptly forgot itself.

“Er,” Newt said.

“Aziraphale,” Mr. Fell said kindly. “Aziraphale or Mr. Fell, whichever is easiest.”

“Mr. Fell,” Newt started.

“Oh, that does sound awfully formal, maybe just Aziraphale then,” Mr. Fell—Aziraphale—frowned. “And this is Anthony Crowley.”

“Crowley,” hissed the man in the sunglasses. “I’m what happens to _you_ if anything happens to him.”

Aziraphale closed his mouth abruptly. “Really, my dear?” he chided.

That explained a lot, Newt decided. Small towns, closed minds—Newt’s uncles had moved to London when he was young to escape just that.

“Understood,” Newt nodded. He’d been very young, but he remembered visiting uncles Sam and David in hospital, Sam’s hand clutched tightly around David’s as the IV machine clicked and the nurses whispered words like “degenerate” and worse in the hallways. It hadn’t looked any more depraved or unnatural to young Newt than the year before, when Mum had gripped Dad’s hand in a different hospital bed and hissed angrily about appendixes and being too stubborn to visit the GP in time.

The front door jingled, and Newt turned. “Oh, Anathema! You found it!”

Anathema was staring (rather rudely, Newt thought to himself before admiring the way her nose looked in profile) at the two men. “You!”

“Us,” Crowley agreed unrepentantly.

Aziraphale smiled ruefully from the counter. “I’m afraid so. It seems we’ve been extended an invitation, so to speak. Are you planning to stay long in the area as well?”

Anathema found a cup of tea pushed into her hands.

“I hadn’t planned on it,” she said, and looked at Newt. Newt, who had barely a fortnight’s experience at being looked at by beautiful women, blushed violently. “But plans changed.”

“They do that,” Aziraphale agreed.

Newt’s head began to hurt. There was something just at the edge of memory, screaming to the surface. Him and Anathema, these two men, the Them, and something very large and very angry—

“Best to let it go,” Aziraphale told him, and Newt’s brain did the sensible thing and forgot it again. “There you are. You know the broad strokes. The details will only hurt, I’m afraid.”

“You aren’t human,” Anathema said.

“No,” Aziraphale admitted.

“That should be very alarming,” Newt said aloud, because someone had to.

“Be not afraid,” Crowley intoned from the couch. Anathema choked.

“I’ll have you know I find that very offensive,” Aziraphale said. “Gabriel’s a real wanker.”

“Angel!” Crowley said, in the gleefully scandalized tone of a gossip columnist who had stumbled onto a particularly juicy piece of dirt.

“Are you sure about this? I can—You don’t actually need a job,” Anathema said. “Agnes provided very well for us.”

Aziraphale and Crowley appeared to be having a conversation that relied entirely upon minute differences in their expressions, which was truly impressive considering Crowley was still wearing sunglasses.

“I’m a retired witchfinder. You’re a witch,” Newt said. “I’m embracing the weirdness. I got to use a tablet this morning! For an hour!”

Anathema winced. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Was it yours? We can replace that,” she told Aziraphale.

“What?” said Aziraphale. “The tablet? Oh, please don’t worry about it. I haven’t got used to the bloody things yet, anyway. Here, take a look around, I believe a section on the occult has just opened up. Er, that is. I’ve opened it up.”

Crowley shook his head sadly from where he was lounging in the armchair like a particularly malevolent piece of performance art.

“I have organized it,” Aziraphale tried again. He looked at Newt. It was almost a question.

“That … makes sense,” Newt said, entirely unsure what question he was supposed to be answering. Aziraphale nodded and meandered into the back room.

“I’ve got to see this,” Anathema murmured. “Were those shelves there before?”

“Um,” said Newt. “I think it’s probably best not to ask.”

\--

At some point in the late afternoon, the armchair stretched sideways into a couch and Aziraphale sat next to him with a cup of tea and a folder full of paperwork. The patch of sunlight from the window curved impossibly onto Crowley’s end of the couch.

“It was in my eyes,” Aziraphale said with a small smile when Crowley lifted his head to look at him.

“Now it’s in mine,” Crowley complained.

“Hush, you old serpent. Enjoy the sunshine.” Aziraphale looked mournfully at the pile of papers on the coffee table. “I was hoping that there might be less paperwork, now.”

“Serves you right,” Crowley muttered, but the warmth of the sun really did appeal to the serpent he had been and Aziraphale’s presence was a comforting weight on the couch next to him. They had spent thousands of years sitting on benches and standing in parks, the two of them. Crowley had risked his very existence to preserve this, whatever it was they had now that the pretense of the Arrangement had been stripped away.

 _Our side_ , Aziraphale had said in London, and it had held none of the denial from Before and none of the mournful resignation Crowley would have expected.

Something was wrong with Aziraphale, Crowley realized. He shifted to watch Aziraphale, who raised an eyebrow briefly but otherwise ignored the scrutiny. Crowley had known Aziraphale long enough that he had been able to talk him into averting the apocalypse. He knew the angel’s moods inside and out.

Aziraphale had been Aziraphale for six thousand years, and on the rare occasion he changed his habits it was after years of dithering over it. And yet.

Aziraphale had agreed that he was _on their side_ without even token resistance. He was shifting his focus from London to Tadfield, whether he admitted it or not. He had decided to invite these humans into his life, on his own, without orders from On High to mentor or save or bless them. He had chatted politely with a local and made notes for an entire shelf devoted to intersectional feminism.

The thought crept in on little cat feet, as the poets like to say, into the fog of Crowley’s subconscious. It slunk through the shadows and walked past in the curious gazes of the Tadfield residents. It whispered that the Antichrist had changed all of reality, hadn’t he? Adam had changed the Hellhound, he had changed The Great Plan, he reached back through time and changed his own demonic nature when he had refused Satan. It whispered that Aziraphale was different, too. Aziraphale’s eyes had never darted to Crowley quite so often, Before. Aziraphale had never smiled so openly. Aziraphale had never been so content to have Crowley this close for this long. Crowley had wanted that too long and too much to ever have missed it.

Well. Crowley had been patient for years upon years already. He would watch and he would wait, and he would have slow, and extremely painful revenge upon someone if Adam had made any “improvements” to Aziraphale at all.

\--

Adam and Dog came in near closing time, after Aziraphale had sent Newt home. Aziraphale felt it the moment Adam crossed the threshold, the way the walls and shelves seemed to shiver as their creator arrived. He was alone, without the children who had stood next to him at the airbase, who had anchored him against War, Famine, and Pollution and loved him enough to risk annihilation to do so.

“Hullo,” Adam said.

Aziraphale stood and smiled and wondered guiltily how much the boy remembered.

“You tried to shoot me,” Adam said, and well. Aziraphale supposed that answered one question.

“I did,” Aziraphale admitted. “I am terribly sorry about that, if it helps.”

Adam looked at him for a moment, and then shrugged. “It’s okay. You were trying to save everyone. Brian almost hit me with a cricket bat.”

Forgiveness. Aziraphale smiled. “Thank you,” he said earnestly. And then, belatedly: “For the bookshop, too. Both of them, I suppose.”

“You’re welcome, I suppose,” Adam said. “I’m glad you came.”

“You’re scared,” Crowley said suddenly.

“Aren’t you?” asked Adam, and oh. Oh, that answered so many questions, Aziraphale thought.

“Well, you needn’t be,” Aziraphale told Adam. “Heaven and Hell will need to come through us before they even think of touching you.” For the first time in millennia, he reached for a sword that wasn’t there. Aziraphale’s shoulder’s itched where wings had once unfurled, and he felt the weight of their absence keenly, painfully.

Lightning struck then, in broad daylight, somewhere close enough that the whole building shook with it. Some weeks before, the locals might have found that to be unusual enough for concern. Some weeks in the future, they might also feel the same. At the moment, the entire region still existed in a metaphysical sweet spot wherein the people unlucky (or lucky, depending on one’s view) enough to live there did not quite remember the strangeness that had come before but still grappled with the troubling certainty that _they had seen worse_.

Crowley looked up curiously.

Aziraphale grinned fiercely at Adam, and Adam’s answering smile shone with the relief of a young boy from whose shoulders the weight of the world has quite abruptly lifted.

Aziraphale had done his best to avoid that weight for too long, he thought angrily. He’d shuffled and prevaricated and he’d _believed_ that Heaven and its agents were infallible, that all the pain and death and horrors he had seen would necessarily end in a greater good. Aziraphale had placed his faith in Heaven, and Heaven had failed the world quite abominably.

There is a common piece of wisdom that says faith can move mountains. An angel’s faith, however, can _literally_ move mountains. There is some debate in the so-called intellectual circles of Heaven as to whether humanity as a whole has forgotten this due to the ravages of time or out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Regardless, the saying is both entirely true and a wild understatement. An angel’s faith is a weapon, a shield, the fulcrum upon which the fates of galaxies can spin.

Once, an angel’s misplaced faith had invented war and divided Heaven; more recently, a different angel’s faith in humanity had helped to save the world.

Crowley walked to the window and squinted up at the sky. He looked back between Adam and Aziraphale, frowning.

“It was really dumb of someone upstairs to give you a sword,” Adam said, and Aziraphale couldn’t help but laugh because, well.

He wasn’t wrong.

“I suppose it’s hard to fight a war without one,” Aziraphale said.

“Pepper says swords ought to be for protecting people and not just fighting to assert our ‘deeply ingrained ideals of masculine superiority,’” Adam said.

Aziraphale sighed, suddenly unbearably weary. “I’ve seen all kinds of swords over the years, Adam. I’ve found that as often as not, they do as much damage as they hope to prevent. Though I am obligated to add that, officially speaking, they ‘lend weight to a moral argument.’”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I- I don’t know,” Aziraphale said after a moment. He flinched, because on the one hand he hadn’t known how true it was until the words were already out and on the other he was entirely certain Crowley wasn’t going to do the decent thing and leave it alone.

“That’s what God’s told you, though?”

The boy wasn’t trying to break him, Aziraphale reminded himself, though he’d had gentler beatings over the years. It wasn’t at all Adam’s fault, what Heaven did.

“That’s rude, even by Hell’s standards,” Crowley observed. Aziraphale glanced back, gratitude curling at the edges of his lips. Crowley huffed uncomfortably. Aziraphale jerked his gaze back to Adam, swallowing.

“God hasn’t spoken to me in six thousand years,” Aziraphale said finally, painfully. He had managed to keep this simple fact from himself until quite recently, and sometimes quite desperately wished he had managed to carry on.

“Exactly,” Adam said, and then Dog barked and ran for the door

It took everything Aziraphale had to nod and smile against the sting, to wish the heat away from his burning cheeks, and agree that yes, it was late, and yes, he looked forward to seeing Adam again.

When Adam left, Aziraphale locked the shop door, flipped the sign from open to closed, and gently laid his forehead against the wood frame. It would be natural to need a moment, he supposed, after so many painful truths.

Aziraphale felt like maybe he needed a decade or several.

“Can I give you a lift?” Crowley asked after a moment, leaving Aziraphale aching with relief and the kind of mental whiplash the world usually reserved for doctor’s offices and ladies’ restrooms. Crowley snapped his fingers, and the lights went out. The shop obediently shuttered its windows.

Aziraphale studied Crowley’s face carefully in the half-light. There was so much more at stake here than a ride, so very much history trapped in the silences that Aziraphale had always been too frightened to untangle.

“Anywhere you want to go, angel,” Crowley tried again. “Come on.”

 _What have I left to lose?_ Aziraphale thought wildly, and the answer was the same it had always been: God, Heaven, Crowley. The first was as resoundingly silent as always, the second was already closed to him, and the third was right there: close and intimate as a knife and sharp enough to cut anyone sufficiently foolish to try and contain him.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, to everything.

\--

They were entering London before Crowley thought to ask Aziraphale where it was he wanted to go. He had turned off the radio and spent the drive fiddling distractedly in the near-silence with various knobs and tapping restlessly at the steering wheel like some kind of _goddamned teenager_.

Crowley seized his own irritation and managed to ride that for a good handful of miles before he looked over at Aziraphale and it vanished abruptly. There were unfamiliar lines of pain and uncertainty etched into that precious, oh so familiar face. Aziraphale was furious, Crowley had finally realized. He had been since the world had begun again. That was what Crowley had been missing this whole time.

Crowley wanted to stare and he also kind of wanted to cover Aziraphale with a curtain or something until it was over.

“You never said where you wanted to go,” Crowley said in a voice that had aimed for calm and sensible and missed spectacularly, landing squarely in the territory between strangled and manic.

“Home, I suppose,” Aziraphale said quietly.

“Soho?” Crowley guessed. As far as Crowley knew, that was where Aziraphale had lived for the last century or so. If Aziraphale had a flat, he’d never breathed a word of it to Crowley.

“I thought it was obvious, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “Home is wherever you are.”

The Bentley, which had been speeding along a meandering and southwestern course, found itself wrenched in an entirely different direction. Nine different motorists drove away from the event having experienced the kind of miraculous escape the brain is driven to expunge as quickly as possible; the tenth motorist experienced the sort of life-altering epiphany that accompanies certain near death experiences and had pulled into the nearest parking spot to phone home.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale yelped.

“We are not having this conversation in my car,” Crowley bit out.

“Crowley-”

“We are not having this conversation in your shop,” Crowley continued doggedly. “We are going to my flat, because my flat is private, it is secure, and most importantly it has not _burned down with you inside of it_ at any point in the recent past! Fuck!”

He was yelling, Crowley realized as he parked the Bentley. This was not at all how Crowley had imagined this conversation might go, though to be perfectly fair Crowley had never actually dared imagine it ever _would._

Aziraphale said, “Language,” in that maddening way he had where it was absolutely just a little inside joke between friends and Crowley took his sunglasses off and stared at him, wild-eyed.

If humans have trains of thought, then angels (even fallen ones) have entire train _stations_. Crowley’s head felt rather like King’s Cross might, if someone had stacked every single train in at once.

Aziraphale frowned. “Crowley- ”

“My flat,” Crowley said, and he was unspeakably grateful that it was Aziraphale here with him, if he had finally run out of clever words. At least it was Aziraphale, _his_ Aziraphale, and not one who’d been changed with the rest of reality.

Crowley had spent so long fearing the worst that stepping out of the Bentley was like stepping out from somewhere deep underwater; the change in pressure was enough to give one the bends.

They walked to the elevator and rode in silence, which Crowley decided was absolutely fine with him because for the moment, he couldn’t slap two coherent thoughts together any more than he could teach Aziraphale to waltz. Which is to say that Crowley probably could, but it would only end in the gavotte.

Crowley stormed into his flat like a summer rain, and Aziraphale followed. Crowley rounded on him in the living room. He had every intention of _demanding answers_ and possibly even gesticulating in a fashion that conveyed the proper amount of frantic, delighted chaos that buzzed just underneath his skin. Except-

Except that when Crowley turned, he found Aziraphale pale-faced and winded with the effort of having just jumped to the exact wrong conclusions.

Aziraphale straightened and moved as if to speak. Crowley panicked and pulled Aziraphale close enough to put Crowley’s mouth over his. He made a valiant effort to panic again, but Aziraphale was warm and welcoming and he made the most glorious sounds when Crowley’s tongue and teeth caught up with his brain and he kissed Aziraphale in earnest.

“Home?” Crowley demanded hoarsely, when he was certain Aziraphale wouldn’t do anything embarrassing like apologize or flee. Aziraphale’s lips were reddened, and his cheeks were an enormously satisfying shade of pink.

“I meant it. Do be quiet, I am having a moment,” Aziraphale breathed, mock-solemn, through Crowley’s delighted laughter, and then he caught Crowley’s head in both hands and kissed him again, carding into his hair with soft fingertips. “May I?”

Crowley had been briefly distracted maneuvering them both into the hallway that lead to the bedroom when Aziraphale’s question caught up to him and absolutely obliterated every single thought process except: “Yes. Yes. _Yes, please.”_

Aziraphale reached out and Crowley rushed forward to meet him and their meeting rolled over him like a wave. It was the best kind of agony, a knife’s edge of ecstasy that didn’t leave room for anything else, a wild screaming _presence_ that Crowley hadn’t felt since before the Fall, back when he had shaped nebulas and kindled stars with the echo of Creation itself still inside him. Aziraphale wrapped himself around Crowley and it was the warmth of a heavy cloak against the winter chill, the old press of armor and shield against the war.

Aziraphale _knew_ Crowley, more intimately than Crowley had been seen or heard or felt since the Fall. Aziraphale knew him and Aziraphale loved— _Loved_ —him right down to the very last atom, as fiercely as Aziraphale had ever loved anything.

Aziraphale loved Crowley with the same force of will that had ushered galaxies into existence and rewritten natural laws and believed in humanity enough to defy Heaven and Hell both. There was kindness and rage and hope and a great shining love like steel, as sharp and hot and fierce as the sword Aziraphale had worn a man’s body to give away, and wasn’t that just like Aziraphale to offer up all of the protection he had with exactly none of the authority to give it? 

It was an explosion of light and sound and senses Crowley had forgotten he had. It was a hurricane of pleasure that sent him gasping and shuddering back into corporeal _shape_.

Crowley took fraction of a second to recover and then shoved himself right back towards Aziraphale, who yanked Crowley in by the shirt at the same time, tumbling them both hard against the wall, fumbling with buttons and desperate to touch.

“Come on, angel. Come on, come _on_ , make the effort angel, just make the effort, I can make you feel so good, I can be so good, you wouldn’t _believe_ how good I can be,” Crowley begged, and kissed Aziraphale breathless, kissed his mouth and his neck and collarbone the way Crowley had been aching to since he had first discovered the carnal pleasures of this form.

Crowley traced the delicate shell of Aziraphale’s ear with his tongue and grinned wickedly as Aziraphale whimpered, panting, eyes nearly crossing as he applied the necessary will.

Then _there_ was his angel ( _his!_ ) hard and real beneath Crowley’s clever fingers, so Crowley took him apart with hands and lips and tongue and Aziraphale didn’t surrender at all; he went willingly, joyfully, taking Crowley right with him.

\--

On the second Tuesday after the end of the world, Crowley checked his phone and said, “Shouldn’t we be getting down to your precious new bookshop?”

“Hmmm?” Aziraphale nuzzled into the space in between Crowley’s shoulder blades and pressed a thoughtful kiss against the spine. He was imagining a ring of keys that had just appeared in Newton Pulsifer’s pocket.

“Your miracles itch,” Crowley complained. “What have you done, anyway?”

“I believe young Mr. Pulsifer can handle the second day, unless you had any special interests there,” Aziraphale said.

“Sloth,” Crowley accused, laughing. “Lust!”

“Love,” Aziraphale disagreed. He bit gently at the join of neck and ear, and he and Crowley shortly found more interesting things to do.

\--

 ** _Aziraphale,_** came the voice some hours later. 

Crowley tumbled off the bed, hissing, scrambling backwards into the far corner and desperately imagining that he was wearing pants and had not recently been snoring softly into Aziraphale’s shoulder. It was a good thing, too, because with the voice came the Light and that was bleaching Crowley’s black sheets white where they draped around Aziraphale. Crowley was never touching those sheets again, he was never touching that _mattress_ again—the absolute best case scenario would be that they might burn the way that consecrated ground did, and if Crowley guessed wrong then he might very well learn what it felt like to truly die the way Ligur had.

Aziraphale had been awake and reading when Crowley’ dozed off and and had lifted his arms reflexively, staring wide-eyed and terrified at Crowley from behind them.

Crowley, not having any better ideas, made several desperate shooing motions indicating that Aziraphale needed to get off the line with the Almighty _yesterday._ Even worse, Aziraphale _nodded_ with the deranged calm of someone who was well and truly fucked and knew it.

“Er,” Aziraphale coughed, lowering his arms and summoning what looked like a smile, “Lord?”

**_Heaven has released you from their service, Aziraphale._ **

Aziraphale looked utterly stricken, and Crowley felt the cold twist of guilt. This was it, the thing Aziraphale feared most, and maybe Crowley hadn’t done it directly but he’d walked him right to it hadn’t he?

Aziraphale covered his face and the Light did not waver, did not even grant him the mercy of looking away.

“Six thousand years!” Crowley said furiously, and then he stopped to take a moment and examine (with no small amount of stunned admiration) the sheer fucking nerve with which some poor bastard had just addressed God Herself. Then he paused again to come to terms with the fact that that poor bastard had been _him._

Aziraphale looked like a man who had lost everything, lost it again, and then come round to discover that there was yet more to lose. Crowley squared his shoulders then squinted up at the Almighty from the floor. “Six thousand years of faithful service, you could give him a _fucking_ _minute!_ ”

Aziraphale stared at Crowley in mute horror. Crowley produced a pair of sunglasses and put them on.

After a moment, the voice spoke again, and She sounded harder that Crowley remembered (and Crowley remembered a lot) and … annoyed?

**_Heaven has released you from their service, Aziraphale, but I have not._ **

“My Lord,” Aziraphale began respectfully, just as Crowley said, “What?!”

“Shut up!” Aziraphale hissed viciously out of the side of his mouth. “Just-”

**_Aziraphale._ **

“Oh! Yes. Terribly sorry. It’s just that I have no idea what that might mean, you see-”

 ** _Think of yourselves as … freelancers,_** She said and that was maddening. Crowley remembered the sulfur, he had spent the rest of his existence doing his best to escape reality’s rundown basement, he had lived with the reality of Lucifer Morningstar, the king of the bloody sadists.

“I don’t work for You!” Crowley shouted. “Don’t you remember? You cast me out! You made the rules!”

 ** _Did I?_** She asked. Crowley stood speechless, radiating enough outrage that in another two thousand years, when humanity developed the proper equipment, it could have been measured from space.

**_There is war in Heaven._ **

“Erm-”

She didn’t answer, but the Light stayed steady. Crowley had the distinct and uncomfortable impression of scrutiny. He thought of Gabriel and Michael and, _shut up and die already._

“It never left, did it?” Crowley asked. Aziraphale looked at Crowley then back up, realization dawning.

 ** _Aziraphale, Guardian of the East Gate,_ **She said. She was speaking directly to Aziraphale, to them, and not using the Metatron. **_Where is your sword?_**

It was a test, Crowley realized, and he was so damn mad he hadn’t seen it right away that he could have kicked someone.

Aziraphale spoke before Crowley could say anything. He looked weary and ashamed. “I- I believe you already know the answer to that, Lord.”

When She spoke again, Her voice rang with delight and Crowley hated himself for the way he swayed toward it more than he hated all of the 14th century.

Well. Most of it, anyway.

**_You are Mine. Here are your orders:_ **

Here it came, thought Crowley. The catch.

 ** _Stand by._** And the Light was gone, leaving only a steadily widening circle of white.

Crowley edged backwards, just in case. “What the fuck?” he said. “What the _fuck_ was that?”

Aziraphale took a deep breath and scrubbed his eyes with his palms. “My dear, if I ever find that out I promise you will be the first to know.”

\--

On the second Wednesday after the end of the world, Newt found what looked like a very old and very expensive shield in the back room of his new workplace. Neither of his employers had been surprised in the least to find what Newt had begun to worry might be a priceless Roman artifact propped against the wall next to the desk. (Newt was still unsure whether he actually worked for Crowley or not, but had decided the safest option was to assume he did, so long as he wasn’t asked to do anything too outrageous.)

“It’s a _clipeus_ ,” Aziraphale said. “They’re Roman. Got quite popular after the _scutum_ went out of style. I haven’t seen one of these in ages. Oh, it’s a nice one, too.”

Aziraphale was inspecting the shield with a curious familiarity. He threaded his arm through the brace and grabbed the handle, setting his shoulders experimentally.

Crowley snapped and pointed “Yes, I remember those! They figured out that box-turtle-thing. Bloody effective, too.”

“The testudo.”

“That’s what I said.”

Aziraphale smiled indulgently at Crowley.

“Um, is this …” Newt pointed at it. “This was made of cardboard and tinfoil yesterday. Adam and the Them were here. He left it for you”

It had, he was positive, started life as a round piece of cardboard covered in tinfoil and decorated with marker.

“This was not metal yesterday,” Newt said, because nobody had yet responded and he was beginning to lose some of his earlier certainty.

“Of course it wasn’t, dear boy, they weren’t even metal when they were in common usage,” Aziraphale said. He’d taken the shield off his arm and turned it around. It was a gorgeous silver metal, inlaid with a snake around the outer edge, all blacks and reds.

“I’m not touching that,” Crowley said.

“Oh! Yes. Better not. Did you find anything else with it?” Aziraphale looked around, then hung the shield carefully on the wall by virtue of holding it out and expecting the proper mounts to appear.

“This, but I’ve got no idea what it says.” Newt held out a small scrap of paper—the really old kind that felt as much like fabric as paper, sometimes. There were markings on it, but they weren’t from any language Newt recognized.

Aziraphale looked heavenward and pocketed the scrap too quickly.

“What’s it say, angel?” Crowley asked, smirking at Aziraphale’s irritated huff.

“If you must know,” Aziraphale said crossly. “It says, ‘Try not to give this one away.’”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This was my deeply indulgent love letter to Good Omens during a roller coaster of a week, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it!


End file.
